Re: [-empyre-] Poetics of DNA II

[Nicholas Ruiz III <editor@intertheory.org>]

Yes, uncertainty is unequivocally implicit in the
Code, its selective repression, expression, and
adaptation within a milieu that too, modulates its
processes; and then that milieu in turn is modulated
by the Coded beings executing genetic and cultural
protocols...for example, in the case of global
warming.

Such uncertainty is categorically where we find
ourselves today, because we know the Code shall
change, eternally, without becoming; and that we too,
shall change without becoming...our destiny.  The
concept of the Code demolishes what is left of the
critical thought that was humanism, though politics
remains, as a metapolitics.  We shall be human, but as
many have already begun to describe, it is our
inhumanity that we must now negotiate on these new
terms, without humanism, and without God.

I suspect we have only begun to understand such a
concept's 'usefulness' in the sense that Code cannot
at present be removed from the system of being, much
like capital, but perhaps that is a different
conversation...  :-)


Borrowing from Baudrillard, we might say:

"The problem is how to give up on a critical thought
that is the very essence of our culture, and belongs
to a history and a past life.  Instead of making a
deterministic analysis of a deterministic society, can
one finally make an indeterminate analysis of an
indeterministic society, a fractal, stochastic,
exponential society of critical mass and extreme
phenomena--a society entirely dominated by the
realtionship of uncertainity...The problem is not to
transfer concepts borrowed from physical, biological
or cosmological science into metaphors or science
fictions, but to transfuse them literally into the
core of the real world, making them suddenly appear in
our real world as nonidentifiable theoretical objects,
as original concepts..."

"From Radical Incertitude, Or Thought as Imposter"
IJBS: 
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_1/baudrillard.htm

NRIII


--- Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I have followed the discussion for the last couple
> days with this 
> thought growing in my mind:
> 
> The reciprocally determining connection between what
> some (for example, 
> HW) are calling "science" and others (for example,
> Judith Roof) are 
> calling "representation" appears to me to be an
> endless spiral. For 
> sure, the most interesting and often the most
> productive science is 
> marked by a constant process of experimental
> falsification, leading to a 
> fresh questioning of the models and measures on
> which previous 
> experiments were based. But that re-evaluation is
> not necessarily 
> immediate and indeed, the operative model may in the
> meantime be used to 
> build quite a lot of technology, while also being
> extended 
> metaphorically as an explanatory or representational
> structure for other 
> processes or realities with which it has no specific
> links whatsoever.
> 
> So, in the case of our discussion here, some speak
> of DNA as "code" 
> (NRIII), using the information-theoretical concept
> that differentiates 
> absolutely between information and whatever channel
> is used for its 
> transmission. This model of information was very
> productive for genetic 
> research, and the notion of DNA as code has become
> so common that some 
> humans view each other as walking computer programs.
> However, if I have 
> correctly understood the science columns in the
> newspapers, the 
> expression of each gene has recently been found to
> be not solely 
> dependent on the information in the DNA "code," but
> also on other 
> processes in the proteins of the cell (I do not have
> precise knowledge 
> here, so anyone who does could explain this). In
> other words, in this 
> case the "channel" apparently contributes something
> to the "code."
> 
> What I am wondering, then, with respect to Eugene
> Thacker's remarks on 
> "openness" and " romanticism," is this: just as
> poetry has long been 
> conceived as an excess over semantics, is there not
> an excess of the 
> genetic process over our model of DNA as code? And
> isn't this kind of 
> excess or openness a stimulant of the continual work
> of 
> reconceptualization and re-evaluation that
> disjunctively links the best 
> science to the elusive "things" that it tries to
> grasp? Finally, 
> wouldn't it be interesting, for other
> representational needs as well, to 
> begin moving beyond, or at least relativizing, this
> model of "code" 
> which has perhaps outlived some of its usefulness
> and productivity - 
> particularly in its application to so-called natural
> languages?
> 
> Excuse me if I make no sense, I am not a scientist
> and I don't know much 
> about DNA.
> 
> best, Brian
> 
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Dr. Nicholas Ruiz III
Editor, Kritikos
http://intertheory.org